Why Democrats Worry About Howard Dean

June 8, 2005 -- -- When Howard Dean speaks to Democratic members of Congress on Capitol Hill on Thursday, will anyone up for re-election in 2006 join him at the traditional post-meeting press conference?

If not, does that mean that the chairman of the Democratic National Committee is too hot for his own good?

Dean's defenders said today that the former Vermont governor was elected precisely because the activists who make up the committee revolted against the power structure that led the party to minority status.

And it's this power structure -- members of Congress, strategists, ad makers, and big-dollar fund-raisers -- who sit as Dean's daily audience as chair. So there is bound to be, his advisers say, a little bit of friction.

Dean tries to accommodate his critics, his aides say. He struggles to avoid discussing legislative specifics. That he leaves to the policy makers in Congress and in the states. He tries to focus on the big picture. That's what a party chair usually does. The job entails keeping the machinery of national politics humming and the base happy and angry until a presidential candidate is nominated a few years hence. The goal is to produce a product -- in this case a coherent national image for Democrats and a strong grassroots base to hawk it -- and hand it off to the right presidential candidate in 2008.

But there has never before been a party chair who came to power as well-defined as Dean is -- one of the most well-known political figures in the country.

And because voters tend to associate a product with its seller, Dean's critics worry that by choosing him as their de-facto standard bearer, the party's liberal activists confirmed three fundamental stereotypes Americans hold about the party: that Democrats scorn an uncompromising defense of American strength in the world; that Democrats are aggressively secular in a country that is moderately religious; and that they are seen as, in the words of pollster Harrison Hickman, the party of contrivance: they make it up as they go along.